Promoting students’ critical thinking (CT) has been an essential goal of higher education. However, despite the various attempts to make CT a primary focus of higher education, there is little agreement regarding the conditions under which instruction could result in greater CT outcomes. In this review, we systematically examined current empirical evidence and attempted to explain why some instructional interventions result in greater CT gains than others.

Article first published in “Higher Education Studies”, V. 4 (2014), n. 1. Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education and reprinted with permission. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.